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Other thoughts:

Day to day browsing is a pain. I use a VNC client to remote into our server, which is running a desktop environment with a regular browser. That way you can use apps (gmail, discord, etc) from outside the Tor network. But since you're tunneling through Tor, this is painfully slow. You'll likely want to type out long messages in Whonix, then copy-paste into your remote session. Each keystroke can sometimes take a full second to appear when animations are heavy.

Transferring large amounts of data is also painful. If you try to start Litecoin Core on Whonix, you'll need to sync more than 30 GB, which can take a very long time.

Patience is your weapon. You have all the time in the world not to make a mistake, and moments to make a fatal one. Think carefully about everything you do.

Stylometry scares me. AI can help here: run an assistant locally, and ask it to reword everything you write. You won't be able to use ChatGPT for this, obviously because OpenAI retains a history of everything you submit, but also because they require a real phone number to sign up. And you can't get a real number through any means I've found so far.

Payment is also a pain. I'm hoping to ask the community to donate Vanilla gift cards so that I can sign up for Tarsnap or spin up a droplet.

By applying the discipline normally found in aeronautics, I think it's possible to do this safely. But you'll still be risking jail time, and the intersection of people who want to do something for altruistic reasons and willing to risk prison is pretty small. I'll be documenting everything I do so that you can learn from my example, or perhaps from my mistakes.



I like the way you describe your process. As the person who made the stylometry thing that made the rounds a while back, I would say the best thing you can do on that front is to either get a "paraphraser" like ChatGPT/translators or just write less. Also, there's a site called smspva.com and a lot of sites like it where you can rent "real" phone numbers and they take every payment method under the sun. Depending on the country a phone number to receive an OpenAI confirmation code is about $0.50, most less popular services are like $0.10-$0.20.


smspva is perfect. Thanks! Do you know of one for gift cards? Particularly ones that could be used to pay for services like server rental or Tarsnap.


You sir are very based.

I too am a fellow qube herder. After having discovered Qubes OS, I've never wanted to go back!


llama.cpp runs LLaMa 2 7B on common hardware like a MacBook Pro. Haven't tried it yet on my RTX 3070 (Mobile) but there's no reason why it shouldn't work.


A 7B LLM has a huge quantity of knowledge about the world. You don't need that just to reword sentences. You can use a translation model with English input and English output, or other Text2Text model such as one for textual style transfer. A purpose-built model for rewording into a fixed style different from the input could be easily be 10M parameters or fewer (that's already big enough for translating between two languages, afterall) but you can readily find models in the 100M range for text style transfer.


Really appreciate what you're doing. Don't let those danish bottom feeders get you!




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